Web and Japan
Dusty Asian bookstore, an old Japanese guy overcharging me for something I didn’t need, and it snapped everything into focus. I’d been wandering intellectually for a while—picking things up and putting them down, never landing anywhere. But standing in that shop I remembered what actually moves me: web design and Japan. They need to connect somehow. That’s it. Everything else is noise.
My girlfriend gets it. She feels the same pull. And at some point you stop pretending other work matters, stop doing jobs that just pay the bills instead of making you want to think and make things. So here we are in 2008—Bush still somehow president, sex in every direction you care to look, same world as always. New year, different resolve. This time I’m actually combining these two things instead of keeping them separate.
I want to design things that feel Japanese without just copying what Japanese design looks like. There’s something about restraint and negative space and this sense of completion that comes from incompleteness—I can’t quite explain it, but I know it when I see it. Web design is what I know how to do; Japan is what I want to know how to think like.
SpongeBob. That stupid yellow thing on the ocean floor with a pink starfish best friend. Complete nonsense. Has no right to work. Does anyway. That’s the work I’m chasing—things that shouldn’t be good but are.
My namesake’s doing real work on his blog. Respect.